The Maze

This is a story based on a backpacking trip my brother and I took in November of 1987. He and his enthusiasm for photography is the other half and the foundation of Morse Brothers Studios. The story was told originally in a Blogger blog post many years ago. I later developed it into its present form to incorporate some more creative elements.

Circling high on the newly heated autumn air, a raven turns its head towards the distant movement. It is not moved by hunger but by curiosity. The raven, like most corvids, is amongst the most intelligent and consequently successful birds. This accounts for their range and habitat. It also accounts for their curiosity which can lead to hijinks and a mischievous nature.

This raven, however, is intent as it twists its wings and dives. One eye on the movement near the horizon, the rising plume of dust and rapid progress of the vehicle, the focus of the raven’s interest.

Finally, it comes to rest along a dusty road on the husk of a yucca flower stalk. It arranges its sleek black-blue feathers, shining like obsidian, in the midmorning light of a cloudless day. The raven scans the long horizon and the irregular sparse vegetation of the desert; stretching away with its red-orange sand intervals.

To the west rise meekly the Henry mountains and to the east the La Sals and the Abajos further to the south, each dusted with snow. Distance conceals innumerable canyons that lie between raven’s vantage and the horizon; canyons raven knows intimately as places of nesting, food, water and endless joy to fly over and through.

It knows what is approaching. Not in the sense that those coming towards the raven know things. Raven knows it in a raven-y way. A renewed encounter of spirit, covenant, guardianship. The raven lets loose a low guttural growl and clacks its enormous beak in recognition and approval as the bright red truck speeds past the raven’s resting place. The raven sees in the vehicle conversation, joy, love, and clacks again approvingly. Calmly it spreads its great black wings and with two effortless strokes propels itself upward as the withered yucca stalk is engulfed in a swirling cloud of red dust.

My brother and I have been up since early that morning driving here from Flagstaff. We leave the pavement just outside of Hanksville Utah and navigate using an Arizona-Utah tourist map and a description from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. We are traveling to Southern Utah in Canyonlands National Park. This was a place that Edward Abbey referred to in an essay called Terra Incognita: Into the Maze (Desert Solitaire, 1968).

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedBut before we can explore The Maze, we have to find out how to get to it. There's only one man in Moab who claims to have been there, a garage mechanic named Bundy, so we pay him a visit.

Squatting on his heels, he draws us a map in the sand. Gas up at Green River, he says-it'll be your last chance. Take about twenty gallons extra. Go south twenty-five miles toward Hanksville. About a mile past Temple Junction, you'll see a little dirt road heading east. Take it. Keep going about thirty-five, forty miles till you get to an old cabin. That's French Spring. Better fill your water cans there; might be your last chance. Then south a few miles toward Land's End brings you out to the head of Flint Trail. Look it over careful before you try to go down. If you make it head north six miles past Elaterite Butte to Big Water Spring-should be water there, though this time of year you can't always be certain. Keep bearing north and east. Seven miles past Big Water Spring you come to The Maze overlook and that's the end of the trail. From there on you could use wings. –Edward Abbey

It was in fact this essay that is the reason to be here. We drive fast, at least 60mph, on that dirt road what seems like hours. It is time to break out the Coors, the smooth road zips under us and in the mirrors, a great plume of dust trails us. We straddle more than one rattlesnake on the road as we head for the Flint Trail.

To the south we see the Henry Mountains, those same mountains my brother and I had camped with our mother and father and Chuck my mother’s tragic younger brother almost 10 years before. Chuck was not quite on the verge of his diabetes yet. His gentle awkwardness that would always trail behind him, accompanied by a need to prove himself. Originating perhaps from being born 10 years later than my mother into the family with an alcoholic father. Sensitive, he sat with us around the campfire strumming his guitar, singing, the rhythmic inhalations and exhalation issuing from his nostrils.

Chuck had a surplus of that Midwestern honesty and duty. He was also cripplingly dull but perhaps one of the kindest most standup people you could ever hope to meet. Life not quite turning out how one imagined he hoped. He lived out a quiet life of the greatest dignity caring for his wife, who was crippled by MS, stricken shortly after they married. Until the early end of his life he was never one to flee a scary and disappointing destiny. He exercised his duty and cared for his beloved wife when many might have abandoned that post.

Before the Flint Trail there is a small Ranger Station with one Park Ranger who we label Ranger Death-breath on account of his halitosis. Death-breath felt obligated to warn us of the difficulties on the Flint Trail. We politely register this warning but once we return to the truck, we dismiss the warnings with alcohol-fueled bravado; pop in a Hank Williams Jr. tape and head towards the Flint Trail. We are brothers and we feel that invincibility of being young and together on another adventure.

The Flint Trail proves a little more treacherous than we thought. The switchbacks so narrow as to be turned only by reversing and turning, reversing and turning until the truck is pointing down the next section of road. This is what Cactus Ed said of the same road...

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe Flint Trail is a jeep track, switch-backing down a talus slope, the only break in the sheer wall of the plateau for a hundred sinuous miles. Originally a horse trail, it was enlarged to jeep size by the uranium hunters, who found nothing down below worth bringing up in trucks and abandoned it. Now, after the recent rains, which were also responsible for the amazing growth of grass and flowers we have seen, we find the trail marvelously eroded, stripped of all vestiges of soil, trenched and gullied down to bare rock, in places more like a stairway than a road. Even if we can get the Land Rover down this thing, how can we ever get it back up again?

But it doesn't occur to either of us to back away from the attempt. We are determined to get into The Maze. Waterman has great confidence in his machine; and furthermore, as with anything enormously attractive, we are obsessed only with getting in; we can worry later about getting out.

Glad to get out of the Land Rover and away from the gasoline fumes, I lead the way on foot down the Flint Trail, moving what rocks I can out of the path. Waterman follows with the vehicle in first gear, low range and four-wheel drive, creeping and lurching downward from rock to rock, in and out of the gutters, at a speed too slow to register on the speedometer. The descent is four miles long, in vertical distance about two thousand feet. In places the trail is so narrow that he has to scrape against the inside wall to get through. The curves are banked the wrong way, sliding toward the outer edge, and the turns at the end of each switchbacks are so tight that we must jockey the Land Rover back and forth to get it around them. But all goes well, and, in an hour, we arrive at the bottom.

–Edward Abbey

Raven perches on the red rimstone and looks down at the progress below. The dusty track winds sharply down the sandstone layers first red and orange then a cream buff color. The canyon dotted with pinyon and juniper trees, thicker on the north-facing slopes where the sun does not strike, and the snow and rain hang about a little longer in the dry desert air. The truck whines through the straight sections then gears down for the hairpin turns, tires scraping and grinding the tight corners. From the muffled sounds of the machine comes some music that floats on the air up from the canyon, muffled by the soft remote silence. Raven clacks his beak in satisfaction; satisfied he has seen them safely on their way. He eyes a small puff of dust a mile further away on the rim; he cannot resist what this means, a rising wind off a cliff face.

He glances again down the canyon below, nods approvingly, crouches, then springs into the air, spreading, powerful wings beat quick strokes in the gentle air and he tracks the sinuous rim of the canyon. Air from the east out of the canyon meets the cliff face and is lofted upwards, raven rides this updraft; effortlessly it carries him higher as he cants and turns to stay on the edge of it. He reaches the place that caught his eye and is buoyed higher, something like thrill or excitement or perhaps joy surges through him as he is elevated rapidly; the pinyon and juniper becoming small green dots in a red sand-stony matrix. Great complicated layers previously concealed by the canyon rim stretch away now to the distant eastern mountains.

Not a flat desert waste like to the west but a monumental eroded veined table that lets down onto other plateaus that then drop to more plateaus and drainages all the way to the thin green strand of river beneath all these sandy parched river bottoms.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe sun burns hot and bright out of a cloudless blue sky
Raven growls as a hot dry wind blows through his feathers

Heat warms the pitch in the pinion and juniper; a sharp smell of the sacred and ritual
The dust stirs beneath and calls to mind water and precious life

The raven’s sharp eye and black cloak contrast the warm radiant sun
Its growl and a mischievous glint comments on the whispering wind
and reminds us that however close death

There is always joy in life and living

The raven surveys this as the rising wind slows and he hovers suspended on moving columns of rising air. Feathers twitch and adjust thoughtlessly before he tucks and plunges. Raven’s favorite, the steep dive down below the canyon rim, the rush of air across his feathers. A gentle whistle now louder as he hurtles towards the ground.

It is always at this point he reflects on his younger self flying beside an owl in the early dark dawn. Thinking he had gone deaf; no sounds of that other bird’s flight. Not during its glide, not during its flapping. Just confounding silence. At the time he let out a probing ‘caw’ to assure himself he was not suddenly deaf. The startled owl became aware of him, and silently turned downwards and away.

Below the canyon rim again the wings unfurl, slow his descent and hurtle him along across the void towards the dark red sandstone butte whose summit is at the same level. Raven glides across the arid ground, sails past the red sandstone butte out to a point overlooking the lower canyon. He descends and perches on the splintered top of a half dead juniper.

Soon Glenn and I are down in this broad valley of red rock with canyon walls around us. As we drive, we can see in the distance Elaterite Butte the landmark that indicates we are heading in the right direction. We had eschewed directions from Death-breathe and were now depending on a topo map that doesn't reflect all the tracks we come across. We head towards Elaterite then skirt around the base of it until we come to the Maze Overlook.

Looking down into the canyon we can see where we were headed for the next day. It spreads out below us in a series of steep cliffs that stack away in the distance like dominoes set on edge. One can trace the serpentine path of the dry riverbeds as they recede in the distance. Somewhere out there is the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers. Beyond that are the triangular humps of the Abajo mountains.

Abbey had some words for the view...

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSeven more miles rough as a cob around the crumbling base of Elaterite Butte, some hesitation and backtracking among alternate jeep trails, all of them dead ends, and we finally come out near sundown on the brink of things, nothing beyond but nothingness—a veil, blue with remoteness—and below the edge the northerly portion of The Maze.

We can see deep narrow canyons down in there branching out in all directions, and sandy floors with clumps of trees—oaks? cottonwoods? Dividing one canyon from the next are high thin partitions of nude sandstone, smoothly sculptured and elaborately serpentine, colored in horizontal bands of gray, buff, rose and maroon. The melted ice-cream effect again—Neapolitan ice cream. On top of one of the walls stand four gigantic monoliths, dark red, angular and square-cornered, capped with remnants of the same hard white rock on which we have brought the Land Rover to a stop. Below these monuments and beyond them the innumerable canyons extend into the base of Elaterite Mesa (which underlies Elaterite Butte) and into the south and southeast for as far as we can see. It is like a labyrinth indeed—a labyrinth with the roof removed.

Very interesting. But first things first. Food. We build a little juniper fire and cook our supper. High wind blowing now—drives the sparks from our fire over the rim, into the velvet abyss. We smoke good cheap cigars and watch the colors slowly change and fade upon the canyon walls, the four great monuments, the spires and buttes and mesas beyond.

–Edward Abbey

We pitched the tent and set up camp. Glenn prepares dinner. We eat in the quiet dusk; the sun sets beneath the dome of deepening blue sky that gives everything on the ground a blue cast.

Gusts of wind rush up the canyon rim and rustle the scrub and pinion. After dinner we retire. The night is spent on the rim of the canyon in my tent. It is comfortable inside and good to spend the night in the warm company of my brother.

We reflect on the long day and the remarkable scenery. It has been a great day, the weather good, the company better. We settle into reading our respective books. For me, Edward Abbey's Down the River, for Glenn, The River Why by David James Duncan. We read to each other humorous or interesting passages. The kangaroo rats rustle outside the tent exploring what we may have left them in our camp. A raven croaks in the distance silhouetted against the dusty scattering of numberless points of light.

Middle of the flocked velvet night. Dark, perhaps as dark as before raven stole the light; stepping outside the tent to relieve myself I am confronted by this dazzling splash of stars in the heavens, so sharp and brilliant as to cause me to hold my head aloft to gaze at them. Steadying myself, looking for a wink or waver in their piercing needle-thin beams projected across the cold void. This was the last part of the continental US to be mapped. A place so remote that Moab is the nearest city; next is Hanksville not a city at all. No other light except that which leaks from the heavens.

Back into the tent and warm comfort, sleep again overtakes me. Sometime during the night my mind slides into some dark foreboding crevice.

Raven sits on the crossed poles of the tent and dreams with me. The darkness is suffocating, a shortness of spiritual breath, a portent, a descent into deeper darkness. Lonelier, the heart closing and hardening; a journey of torment and realization. Turning, urgent soft frightened moans of someone bound or being pursued. Raven shakes its feathers and tucks its black beak under a wing.

On some dark psychic horizon, a warmth, a glow, feelings of love and companionship draw closer. Receding, at times elusive, a truth is apparent. This love, brother, life is evanescent. Seeing time stretched, receding across the eternal landscape, one’s life is short and youth and ambition and self blinds one to this precious gift. The somber drapery of time and mortality to fall on loved ones too soon.

Raven awakens at first light from the night’s vigil, a covenant since he first found man cowering under a shell. The first rays of sunlight strike his back and he quietly preens and arranges his feathers as the sun warms him. The occupants of the tent stir and with the buzz of the zipper emerge. Soon the smell of food and the raven realizes he must eat too.

Raven leaps and flaps across the brush and juniper landscape. He flies towards a desiccated deer carcass. At the bottom of a cliff it has rested for the last few weeks after raven had seen it leap into the void and plunge from the cliff edge above. It fell with a kind of grace, unexpected for such a large animal, slowly twisting its neck to look up or perhaps to right itself. It didn’t struggle and seemed more surprised than terrified. It landed with a whump! on the hard, flat sandstone and the life went from its eyes as the last of the air not violently forced out, this last air of its last breath, sighed and whimpered from its lungs. Secretly raven harbored the knowledge that he had hidden himself in a crevice in the cliff that fateful day until the deer came to browse on the thin green grasses on the cliff edge. Raven had squawked, flapped its wings noisily and startled the deer, it leapt…

Soon other ravens, vultures and finally the coyotes turned up to the jubilee. However, by now it had mostly dried out and the offal and larger pieces of meat had been consumed. Raven worked his beak into a section of dried haunch, pecked and worked at the hide and dried meat to find ripe soft beak-fulls of deer. He takes a last strip of meat and fly-hops to a nearby ant mound.

Here he plays his ant-game. He drops the meat next to the opening, picks up a small stick and torments the opening until the fat red ants emerge. He waits until they have found the meat and crawl over it wrestling it back to their nest. Next raven pounces and lifts the writhing mass in his beak and swallows it whole. Now he has eaten his fill.

That morning Glenn and I load up our packs and head down the trail. At first easy to find; but as it plunges over the rimrock, we find it gets lost as trails do on the slickrock. The trail has a habit of following a stratum until a breach is found and it can descend to the next layer. We brought no rope and are confounded by the trail ending at a rock face. Looking closer we could see that there was a rough ledge for one's feet and places to grab with our hands that would allow us to inch our way along this edge of this cream-colored sandstone cliff; some hundred feet over the canyon bottom, the drop surely fatal.

Without packs it looks possible; with packs it is not clear you could hold on. Cursing the lack of rope, we manage to tie our belts together.

I would go around the cliff face, Glenn to pass me the belt end attached to my pack and I then haul my pack around. I press myself against the rock face put my hands onto the upper ledge and began inching my feet along the lower ledge. Unlike Glenn I am cursed with a fear of heights, I cannot look down and have frozen on rock faces before. The best thing about traveling with Glenn however, is his coolness and his level-headed advice. He guides me as I work around the edge of the rock.

At one point I freeze with fear. Gripping the rough rock surface, face and body presses against the cold creamy stone. I cling there trembling, trying not to think about the abyss below. My mind spins back to a time earlier in my childhood on Red Mountain clinging to the rough cinder coated lava core, suddenly aware that I could fall and hurt myself, my parents alternating between encouragement and caution.

Not wanting to look down, I look up to the blue sky and my attention is held by raven peering down at me from the cliff edge above. It makes a soft growl and hops about and half flaps its wings. The concerned voice of my brother melts into silence as I watch this birds' antics. The dark shiny eyes locked on mine; I am for a moment liberated, almost free of my body, and a calmness comes over me. Glenn’s voice comes back to me now and I watch the raven as it gambols about above me teasing gravity. My hands and feet feel for what my brother describes to me.

With repeated efforts, not without its own danger, I manage to grab hold of the belt end and pull my pack across.

Glenn decides this was all too much work and in carefree fashion he traverses the band of cliff face with his pack on and we have made our way past the difficult section.

Soon we were on the sandy canyon floor. The cottonwoods yellow in the fall air, with scattered sage and juniper dotting the bottom of the dry riverbed.

On the canyon floor, we find the rest of the trail and walk up the canyon. Most of the time the trail follows the wash bottom which means all traces of the trail were obliterated by the last rains and flood of water. We must scan ahead on the wash banks to see where the trail might emerge, a creation of man, insistent on the shortest distance between two points; in contradiction to the meandering flow of the water.

The dry riverbed itself is difficult walking with deep sand dissipating energy; we look forward to the places where the trail goes overland between the sage and juniper. Glancing up a side canyon on the right we see the Chocolate Drops high above us.

As we walk beside the sandstone walls, we notice petroglyphs. Some of them quite high up and most enigmatic. The remnants of some Anasazi's work; impossible to fathom their meaning.

Some of the more obvious shapes are snakes, deer or elk (perhaps buffalo?) of some sort, and people expressed as some oddly distorted shapes. They are high up on the canyon walls from a time when the level of the soil was much higher and had now been eroded down to where we now stood.

The weather this time of year in the canyon is cooler and quite tolerable. At the height of summer, it would have been oppressively hot, and we would have been slaves to our water supplies. We had set a vague destination of Lizard Rock at the end of the canyon. This entails a climb out of far end of the canyon.

There is something about the ineffable scale of the place that makes one focus on the small and intimate. A tiny bird flitting between the branches of a tree. Arrangements of grass and vegetation, patches of lichen on the sandstone walls. These small detailed things become a psychic respite from vastness, stone, and sky.

We continue hiking the rest of the day on the sandy floor of the canyon taking in the shifting scenes of side canyons and strangely shaped smooth red and white rock. Finally, in the late afternoon, we arrive at the end of the canyon.

The trail terminates at a series of cliffs and a steep narrow defile at the entrance of which there is a log propped up against it. The idea is to use this log to aid one as you push yourself up the cliff. We make a few tentative attempts but decide to have a more committed attempt in the morning.

The weather turning sour, clouds, building all afternoon, now look gray-blue, rain-heavy. We find a nearby overhang and erect the tent underneath. This would give us a dry camp and kitchen. Glenn starts dinner and I wander about the area and take a photo of him hunched over the stove. This is a familiar sight in camp as Glenn always enjoyed preparing the evening meal and this often meant a welcome unexpected treat in the wilderness.

It rains steadily all night long. Varying from a steady drizzle to much harder downpours. ‘Like a cow pissing on a flat rock’ Glenn would say. Our sleep is interrupted by the sound of rocks clattering off the high cliffs and their soft thump as they land in the sand. We hear water pouring off the normally dry cliffs.

As the soft envelope of weariness surrounds me, I sink into its core and consciousness seeps away into the somnolent abyss. I startle, perhaps a rock crashing, then the soft hiss of sand from the cliffs, the crack and scurry of more small rocks, the heavy rumbling thump of a huge boulder. My eyes open; the fabric of the tent thinned and torn to reveal the sky wheeling past my eyes, my frozen gaze, night and day, clouds, sky, stars, the moon. And this constant sound of sifting sand. My skin drying and peeling back from bone, a desiccation and lightening of body and spirit. All while the universe wheels above hot, cold, dry, wet, very wet, wind, storm, calm. The canyon walls getting lower, the sand higher. Raven stops and visits, standing on my skull. Looking after me, communing, before flying off again to some meal or mischief. Finally, the sand covers the last of my vision and I fall again deep into the timeless darkness.

We awaken the next morning to a gray cool day with a steady drizzle of rain. Water pours off clifftops in places; some clear, some stained red revealing the source was either a clay soil bed or a clean expanse of naked rock.

Raven baths in a dribbling shower under a cliff. Twisting and turning its blue-black feathered wings and spiked neck feathers under the spray. It then shakes, launches itself into the air and beat its wings on a long, arced path to the top of the canyon to continue its overwatch.

Attempts to now climb the wall at the end of the canyon prove more futile as we cannot get traction on the wet rock and log. Given this we are suddenly concerned about getting past the difficult bit of rock we encountered on the way into the canyon the day before. We decide to head back towards the trailhead and the truck.

We walk back with the wet sand clinging to our boots, marveling now and again at the numerous waterfalls that had appeared overnight.

There is something that happens on a returning. That decision, the turn, that moment. Suddenly there is the feeling of done, over, conclusion or at least the beginnings of it. That steady gentle psychic tug back to the start. It is subtle this feeling and has taken years to recognize and understand but it is present from that cusp ever to the end of a journey. It has with it the sadness of a kind ending or a parting.

At the base of a cliff we are arrested by the sight of a deer skull. Bits of desiccated meat and skin still clung stubbornly to parts of the skull and we both feel it embodies a sense of mortality and vulnerability. We decide to call it "Death".

Glenn photographs it in black and white with his Hasselblad. Later he printed and mounted the photo for me as a remembrance of the trip. I have always since kept it in my office at work and now it sits on the wall in my home. During the developing or fixing something went wrong with the chemistry and a kind of orange halo developed around the whitest bone-antler parts of the image. Rather than ruin the photo it seems to improve it.

By the end of the day we find ourselves at the trail out of the Maze and up to the Overlook again. We find another way back up to the top, avoiding the treacherous section we encountered on the way down. The gray clouds had hung low and saturated over our heads all day. As we reach the top, we are treated to the magnificent scene of the sun slotting between the low clouds and the horizon as it sets. It cast its deepening warm light across the tops of the Chocolate Drops and skips across the lighter tops of the Maze in a brilliant display of light and drama.

Abbey left the canyon in much the way we did. Here is a passage from Desert Solitaire again.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIt is now late in the afternoon. We don't have much time left before sundown. Our sleeping bags are up on the rim in the Land Rover and we have nothing to eat but nuts and raisins. We decide it best to climb out of The Maze before dark and save further exploration for tomorrow. We go back to the pool and the base of the ridge. On the way Waterman points out to me the petroglyph of a snake, which I had missed. The Indians had been here. But nobody else, so far as we can tell. Nowhere have we seen a trace of the white man or of his horse or cow—or helicopter. But then we have seen only a tiny corner of The Maze, maybe no more than one percent of it. The heart of it remains unknown.

We climb the ridge, scale the bluffs, and traverse without difficulty the sloping red bench for a mile to the east, where we find the notch that leads to the top through the white rimrock. As we proceed we mark our route with pointer stones; this will be known hereafter, for a thousand years, as the Abbey-Waterman Trail. Maybe. More likely the BLM or the Park Service will bypass our trail with an electrical chair-lift for crippled tourists.

We reach the rim a little before sundown and after a quick supper—for it's cold and windy up here—go early to bed. Above the Orange Cliffs a dismal sunset of bloody sun and gray overcast lingers for a long time on the horizon while the wind howls across our prostrate forms all night long. –Edward Abbey

The roads are like bacon grease, we slide about on every turn and tilt of the road. The road begins to trace its course on a high bench of sandstone; on the right a set of high red cliffs rise above us while another cliff drops from our left sloping down towards the Colorado River, eventually. At times we slip perilously close to the edge.

It is the next morning and we have decided a different route of return. Consulting the topo map a long track out to the highway shows a way to avoid the steep rain-slicked Flint Trail.

Occasionally we encounter a stunning exhibit of the weather with a red-brown waterfall pouring off the high cliffs above us.

At one point we decide to get out to explore a slot canyon that runs below the road. A thin muddy stream runs in the bottom. We climb over the slick rock down into the canyon. We watch fresh water running off the surrounding rocks into the muddy torrent.

Nestled down in this narrow canyon we suddenly heard a roar above us. The sound of a passing jet perhaps, we run back to the top to investigate. The sound growing louder we reach the top in time to see a wall of water crashing down the canyon we had just clamored out of. Three feet high it fills the canyon with a fresh angry swirl of red mud.

Ed Abbey witnessed a similar sight in Desert Solitaire...

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAround the bend up-canyon poured a red snout of liquid mud, which seemed to mumble to itself as it advanced. Sliding greasily forward the snout of mud dashed against the undercut wall on the outside of the bend, wallowed over ledges and swung back to the main channel in the center of the canyon floor. The clear perennial stream which flowed there was suddenly buried,

extinguished. Swaying from side to side in the rhythm of its pendulous momentum, like a locomotive on uneven rails, the flood rumbled down upon the boy and the dead tree and everything else in its path. Dust sailed into the air as it crashed into mudbanks; cracks rippled like lightning over the surface of the alluvium, yawning wide apart as chunks and blocks and sections of dried-out earth slid or toppled into the torrent. On the crest of the flood as it came, above the churning debris of bushes, vines, weeds and logs, floated a delicate and rosy vapor, a fine pink mist suffused with the glow of sunlight. –Edward Abbey

We drive for four and a half hours on dwindling fuel what was slightly over 30 miles of road. Finally, the country opens a little more.

We reach the edge of a wide new river where the road was, the highway in sight on the other side. We are stunned and disappointed. Not enough gas to drive back the way we came I ask my brother for his sage advice. "Go for it!". I rev the engine and we plow our way through the high water to safety. We are headed to Hanksville.

We finish our travels in Capitol Reef camping and hiking the Waterpocket Fold before heading home to Flagstaff and Tucson. How precious this time with my brother, great rival of boyhood and best companion in adulthood. A rare unquestioned mutual affection and love.

More Photos Follow… (all photos by Glenn Morse)